Hard road ahead for auto-workers

If Mitsubishi shutdown of 2007 is a guide, 3000 Holden auto-workers face a tough transition into the post-manufacturing future. Alex Mann reports.

Transcript

LEIGH SALES, PRESENTER: Job creation, not a handout is Federal Government's answer for thousands of Holden workers who'll lose their jobs as the car manufacturer shuts down Australian operations.

The Prime Minister today announced a $100 million fund to go to the states affected by Holden's closure, but a taskforce is yet to work out the exact details of how to best spend the money.

The aim though will be innovation and new jobs.

In South Australia, the challenge of finding fresh opportunities for sacked car industry workers is familiar territory. The state's still recovering from Mitsubishi's departure in 2008, as Alex Mann reports from Adelaide.

ALEX MANN, REPORTER: It's been a full week of recriminations and finger-pointing since Holden made the announcement to go.

MIKE DEVEREUX, MD, HOLDEN: As painful as it is to say, building cars in this country is just not sustainable.

ALEX MANN: The company never got the handout says it needed to stay, but today the state premiers and Holden workers got one of their own. The Government announced a $60 million contribution to a $100 million fund and an industry taskforce to identify where best to spend the money.

TONY ABBOTT, PRIME MINISTER: What we are on about is trying to ensure that the workers of this country transition from good jobs to better jobs, from the industries of the past to the industries of the future. Some of them will find it difficult, but many of them will probably be liberated to pursue new opportunities and to get on with their - get on with their lives.

DENIS NAPTHINE, VICTORIAN PREMIER: The $100 million is a good first step. It is a first step only and I emphasise that. And I would fully expect, as Premier of Victoria, that as those reviews are undertaken and report, that they are accompanied by significant investment from the Federal Government.

ALEX MANN: South Australian Premier Jay Weatherill was scathing.

JAY WEATHERILL, SA PREMIER: Pathetic. At the very least, the Commonwealth has set aside $1 billion into the future and a $215 million associated with Holden. So, that's money we know is in the federal budget, and then they want to throw $60 million at both SA and Victoria to deal with what has been the most significant restructuring of the South Australian economy that we would have seen in recent memory.

ALEX MANN: In this modest unit not far from Mitsubishi's old Adelaide plants and as thousands of Holden workers contemplate an uncertain future, Denis Oldham is getting flashbacks. He lost his job with Mitsubishi when they shut up shop in 2008 after 15 years with the company.

DENIS OLDHAM, FORMER MITSUBISHI WORKER: It's a very - it's too hard to grasp, I think, until it really happens, you know. And then when it does happen, you think, "Well that's it; you've got to start doing something now," you know.

ALEX MANN: When Denis Oldham lost his job, just like today, "transition" was the word on everyone's lips.

DENIS OLDHAM: Mitsubishi did do a lot for us in one respect by bringing professional people in to do - help you with your resume.

ALEX MANN: But the fresh CV did little to get Denis Oldham a job like the one he'd lost.

DENIS OLDHAM: Well the hardest part was the security side of it. You know, you want something with stability, I think. And I didn't think it'd be that hard, but it was. It was very hard at first.

ALEX MANN: More than 1,000 Mitsubishi workers lost their jobs when the Adelaide plants closed.

Despite employment and training services designed to help them into long-term replacement jobs, for many, those opportunities never eventuated.

FRAN BAUM, SCHOOL OF MEDICINE, FLINDERS UNI.: We found that at first they really struggled with finding jobs.

ALEX MANN: Professor Fran Baum is a researcher at Adelaide's Flinders University and has conducted interviews with hundreds of Mitsubishi's former employees for years after the plant's closure.

FRAN BAUM: A lot of them, for instance, said, "Oh, we had to do a forklift driver's licence, yet there were no jobs in that area," or they felt that the jobs that they were offered weren't very helpful or employers were given money to employ them, but then they felt that they only kept them for three months and then they were laid off again.

ALEX MANN: Of the workers Fran Baum spoke to, a third either left the workforce or became long-term unemployed.

FRAN BAUM: But those who were in work tended to have less good conditions, they were very often employed casually, they didn't have the same conditions that they had at Mitsubishi and they generally reported that it wasn't such a good work environment.

ALEX MANN: The former Mitsubishi site at Tonsley Park is now the centrepiece of the State Government's vision for the future of manufacturing in SA.

The state hopes to attract $1 billion in investment on this site over the next 20 years and to create more than 6,000 jobs. So far, Flinders University and SA TAFE have announced campuses and research centres for the site, while tech giant Siemens and a local data storage company, Tier5, are busy moving in.

Today, that high-tech vision is slowly taking shape.

One of the new sites' first residents is Tier5's managing director, Marty Gauvin. This massive, cavernous shed will soon be home to thousands of his computer servers, storing unimaginable gigabytes of data.

MARTY GAUVIN, MD, TIER5: The great thing from our perspective is there's then a flow-on benefit also in terms of other technology companies. So just as in the past, you had the component manufacturers for the car companies, so this kind of facility then tends to draw software development companies and services businesses and so forth.

ALEX MANN: But in the short-term, there will be few new jobs on this site. Tier5 and its Tonsley Park stablemates are all pre-existing South Australian businesses or institutions that have moved from elsewhere in the city. Marty Gauvin freely admits that with his projected workforce of just 15 staff, his business is not the answer for out-of-work auto manufacturers.

MARTY GAUVIN: You're not going to see the idea of one person working on one machine at Mitsubishi or Holden and then transitioned into that person working on another newer machine for some newer advanced manufacturer.

FRAN BAUM: The big question is what new industries will be attracted there and I think we're still waiting to see exactly what that will look like.

ALEX MANN: The high-tech transition didn't work out for Denis Oldham, but he's not complaining. His new job as an aged care worker is part-time and he's been happily employed for three years.

DENIS OLDHAM: A lot of people said to me, "How can you do that kind of job?" I said, "Well, you put yourself in these people's positions. You know, you take a good look at your own life first and think: how would you like to be looked after?" And I think, well, yeah, that's for me.